Antiquity and classicism are central to the aesthetic construction of both Mann’s Aschenbach and D’Annunzio’s Stelio. Der Tod in Venedig and Il fuoco are steeped in allusions to classical figures, symbols and icons from antiquity, and aspects of Greek tragedy. This classicism serves several functions, enriching the two texts: as shall be demonstrated, for example, allusions to figures of antiquity hint at plot developments or reveal the psychology of Mann’s and D’Annunzio’s characters.
For Stelio Effrena, a revival of ancient myth is the key to his aim of aestheticising his public and realising a rebirth of tragedy. Venice provides the
‘genius loci für das Entstehen eines unerhört neuen Kunstwerks aus der Wiederbelebung des antiken Mythos’.1 This city, which so uniquely and crucially inspires the artist, is replete with symbols and characters from Greek history and legend. Many are inherently tragic in nature, drawn from Attic tragedy. Foscarina is similarly endowed with a tragic nature, often exuding the air of a tragic heroine. As will be seen, she appears transfigured into heroines of Greek tragedy (such as Cassandra), and her character seems inseparable from the melancholy figures she portrays on stage.
Aschenbach, the ‘devotee of classicism’,2 has a similar reverence for the ancient Greeks, and emulates classical literature in his own writing. ‘Der geduldige Künstler’3 (T 565) writes with restraint and control, and ‘ordnende Kraft und antithetische Beredsamkeit’4 (T 565). Aschenbach’s classicism, which should provide familiarity and security, ironically becomes the vehicle through which repressed
1 ‘genius loci for the emergence of an unprecedented and new work of art through the revival of ancient myth’, Galvan, p. 264.
2 Robertson, p. 97.
3 ‘the patient artist’.
4 ‘organised power and antithetical eloquence’.
impulses are exposed, as we observe his tendency to invoke classical figures and episodes in his increasingly enraptured interpretations of his Venetian experiences.
Thus, for example, Tadzio becomes Phaedrus to his Socrates (T 607). Mann’s use of a classical framework functions largely to elucidate his protagonist’s psychological development through the novella. Gronicka finds that Mann’s use of classical references thus ‘creates a unique work of art, suspended in an unceasing tension between the poles of psychological realism and the symbolism of myth’.5 It also illustrates the development of Aschenbach’s aesthetic values, demonstrating his shift from neutral appreciation to heated fixation. Mann’s invocations of ancient Greece, however, demand caution. Mann may well have intended his reader to arrive at a parodistic or ironic reading, designed to caricature Aschenbach, as will be examined.
With the general functions of the myriad classical allusions in mind, we can now examine specific antique references in the texts.
Mann’s first allusion to classicism in Der Tod in Venedig strikes us as soon as we regard the novella’s structure. The five chapters are probably a nod to the division of classical tragedies into five acts. The events of each of Mann’s chapters also seems to tally with the traditional acts of the drama, as restated by Gustav Freytag: ‘der erste enthält die Einleitung, der zweite die Steigerung, der dritte den Höhepunkt, der vierte die Umkehr, der fünfte die Katastrophe’.6 This schema certainly seems applicable to Mann’s novella, and we can perhaps describe Aschenbach’s fatal utterance of ‘Ich liebe dich!’7 (T 614) in the fourth chapter as the ‘Umkehr’ (symbolising the moment at which restraint is abandoned) and his death in the fifth chapter as the ‘Katastrophe’.
5 André von Gronicka, ‘Myth Plus Psychology, A Style Analysis of Death in Venice’, Germanic Review, 31 (1956), 191-205 (p. 193).
6 ‘the first comprises the exposition, the second the rising action, the third the climax, the fourth the falling action, the fifth the catastrophe’, Gustav Freytag, Die Technik des Dramas (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1863), p. 168.
7 ‘I love you!’
The positioning of Aschenbach within a novella whose structure is classically inspired sets the tone for his Venetian experiences. Struck by Tadzio’s beauty, and troubled by his sensual response to the youth, Aschenbach interprets (and attempts to excuse, whether consciously or not) his experiences by superimposing a classical reading over them. The frequency with which he does this increases in direct proportion to the intensification of his obsession with Tadzio. As his desire for the boy grows, so does the number of mythical metamorphoses: immediately after Aschenbach’s symbolic ‘bereitwillig willkommen heißende, gelassen aufnehmende Gebärde’8 (T 602), where he opens up his arms to embrace his fate, the narrator describes the rising of the sun as observed by Aschenbach. But now this daily event and symbol of earthly regularity has become the epic journey of ‘der Gott mit den hitzigen Wangen’9 (T 602). Even the wind is driven by ‘die Rosse Poseidons’10 (T 611). These transformations of the mundane into the mythical are therefore connected to Aschenbach’s reaction to Tadzio, and the beauty that so moves the writer.
In order to ennoble and justify his obsession with Tadzio, Aschenbach turns to Plato and Plutarch, reading his experience through their ideals. In particular, turning to Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus (appropriately ‘saturated’11 with homoeroticism) he casts himself as Socrates, assuming the role of affectionate and pedagogic companion to Tadzio’s Phaedrus, with Venice transfigured into the Athenian plane where they converse (T 617). But Aschenbach is a participant in a decidedly one-sided dialogue.
Aschenbach interprets Tadzio as a manifestation of beauty itself, in its original (Platonic) ‘Form’. In Plato’s metaphysics, Forms are ‘natures existing independently of sensibles: eternal, changeless, divine [...], they are perfectly beautiful, just, etc. and
8 ‘eagerly welcoming, calmly accepting gesture’.
9 ‘the god with the flaming cheeks’.
10 ‘the horses of Poseidon’.
11 Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessell (eds.), A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann (New York:
Camden House, 2004), p. 105.
of the highest value’;12 objects perceived sensorily, by contrast, are transient and inferior. Aschenbach therefore feels his slavish voyeurism is justified, remembering that ‘nur die Schönheit ist göttlich und sichtbar zugleich, und so ist sie [...] der Weg des Künstlers zum Geiste’13 (T 637). This teaching explains how reverent and intellectual appreciation of beauty can convey one’s soul to higher realms. The sight of a truly beautiful figure reminds the onlooker of the original Form of beauty, which humans knew before birth, ‘but necessarily forgot when they entered earthly existence’.14 Aschenbach believes he is beholding ‘das Schöne selbst [...], die Form als Gottesgedanken, [...] und von der ein menschliches Abbild und Gleichnis hier leicht und hold zur Anbetung aufgerichtet war’15 (T 606).
Yet, as Robertson notes when examining the Platonic doctrine to which Aschenbach turns, ‘by this stringent standard, Aschenbach’s Platonism is false’.16 The beauty he beholds does not grant intellectual or spiritual enlightenment, but rather intoxication, and feverish agitation.17 ‘Der Betrachtende’18 (T 605) becomes ‘der Verwirrte’19 (T 619). Aschenbach’s recourse to mythical allusions is revealed as an attempt to master a situation over which he is losing control. Robertson notes that ‘in Death in Venice, “mythic” experience is shown by the sceptical narrator to be projected onto his actual experience by the increasingly enraptured Aschenbach’.20 It is Aschenbach alone who glosses over the uncomfortable aspects of his experience with the emulsion of classicism.
12 Christopher Charles Whiston Taylor, From the Beginning to Plato (London: Routledge, 1997), p.
367.
13 ‘only beauty is both divine and visible at the same time, and so it is [...] the way of the artist to the soul’.
14 Reed, 1994, p. 54.
15 ‘[...] to embrace beauty itself, the Form as the thought of a god, [...] and of which a human image and allegory was here erected meekly and lightly for worship’.
16 Robertson, p. 102.
17 See, for example, ‘Das war der Rausch’ (‘That was intoxication’, T 606).
18 ‘the onlooker’.
19 ‘the confused one’.
20 Robertson, p. 101.
Elements of Aschenbach’s increasingly agitated response to Tadzio and his desire resemble another classical dialogue, namely Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love, especially the Erotikos. Indeed, so striking a resemblance does Barberà observe that she posits this dialogue as the principal classical source to which Mann looks, rejecting the accepted view that it is Plato’s dialogues on which Mann primarily draws.21 Her argument centres around several extracts, which indeed show a startling symmetry; for example, we can compare Mann’s ‘Amor fürwahr tat es den Mathematikern gleich, die unfähigen Kindern greifbare Bilder der reinen Formen vorzeigen’22 (T 606) and Plutarch’s explanation of how love approaches the soul through the body, just as ‘teachers of geometry’ offer their students ‘tangible and visible copies of spheres and cubes’.23 In the Erotikos we also read that love shows us
‘young men radiant in the prime of their beauty’24 to incite us, comparable to Mann’s
‘So auch bediente der Gott sich, um uns das Geistige sichtbar zu machen, gern der Gestalt und Garbe menschlicher Jugend’25 (T 606); and that, whilst ‘in erotic madness’,26 one ‘pursues by day and haunts the door by night’27, echoed when Aschenbach leans his head against Tadzio’s door after a fruitless and exhausting pursuit (T 619).
As well as inserting himself (and Tadzio) into these classical dialogues, Aschenbach - and Mann’s narrator - also turn to specific episodes from Greek mythology. Mann’s carefully chosen allusions modify the way that we interpret the relationship between Aschenbach and the object of his desire, often casting doubt on
21 Pau Gilabert Barberà, ‘Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice or Plutarch’s way towards Eros’, L’Anuari de Filologia, Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya, 15 (1992), 25-47.
22 ‘Eros indeed mimicked the mathematicians who presented inept children with concrete images of abstract shapes’.
23 Plutarch, The Erotikos, cited by Barberà, p. 13.
24 Plutarch, cited by Barberà, p. 13.
25 ‘So, too, the god made willing use of the form and colour of human youth to make the spiritual visible’.
26 Plutarch, cited by Barberà, p. 18.
27 Ibid.
the notion of the spiritually enlightened relationship that Aschenbach attempts to create. In Aschenbach’s eyes, Tadzio becomes Hyacinth, ‘der sterben mußte, weil zwei Götter ihn liebten’28 (T 612). According to mythology, the rivalry between Zephyr and Apollo, both besotted with the beautiful youth Hyacinth, resulted in the boy’s death. Observing Hyacinth and Apollo playing, Zephyr jealously caused the wind to carry their discus, which fatally wounded Hyacinth. Alluding to this, Mann hints at the danger that lies within Aschenbach’s desire for Tadzio. It is significant that Apollo is said to have ‘neglected for [Hyacinth] his lyre’29 – just as Aschenbach will neglect his artistic work to pursue Tadzio.30 We may also remember how Aschenbach, noticing Tadzio’s bad teeth31 and signs of sickliness, realises that the boy will probably die young, and fails to explain the ‘Gefühl der Genugtuung oder Beruhigung [...] das diesen Gedanken begleitete’32 (T 595). If we attempt to account for it, perhaps we can conclude (as Heilbut has) that ‘the older man need fear no posthumous rivals’33 for Tadzio’s love. Dying young would also ensure that Tadzio’s beauty never faded.
Further hinting at the harmful nature of Aschenbach’s desire, Mann introduces Ganymede. During his brief period of artistic production on the beach, Aschenbach, watching Tadzio, models his words on the ‘Körper [...], der ihm göttlich schien’34 (T 608), to convey the boy’s beauty to a higher intellectual realm – ‘wie der Adler einst
28 ‘who had to die because two gods loved him’.
29 Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch’s Mythology (London: Octopus, 1989), p. 52.
30 We read that ‘er warf das Schreibzeug beiseite’ (‘he pushed his writing things aside’, T 592), for example.
31 Bad teeth are frequently used by Mann to suggest decadence indicative of overindulgence, and death.
In Buddenbrooks we read of the sickly and decadent Hanno: ‘Besonders seine Zähne hatten von jeher die Ursache von mancherlei schmerzhaften Störungen und Beschwerden ausgemacht.’ (‘His teeth especially had always been the cause of many excruciating disorders and afflictions.’) Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1981), p. 522.
32 ‘declined to account for the feeling of gratification and calmness that accompanied these thoughts’.
33 Anthony Heilbut, Thomas Mann – Eros and Literature (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 254.
34 ‘body [...] that seemed to him divine’.
den troischen Hirten zum Äther trug’35 (T 608). Here the eagle is Zeus, transfigured to kidnap the shepherd-boy Ganymede. The story of the abduction tells that Zeus was so struck by the exceptional beauty of the mortal boy, desiring him ‘as his bedfellow’ in addition to his cup-bearer,36 that he carried him away to Olympus. Over time the story of Zeus and Ganymede became ‘the paradigm for pederastic relationships’,37 indeed, Plato invoked the myth to ‘justify his own sentimental feelings towards his pupils’,38 a strategy Aschenbach has employed.39
The allusion to Ganymede may not be as straightforward as it first appears, however. Van Mander describes Ganymede as ‘the one least defiled by the physical uncleanness of evil desires: the part chosen by God and drawn up to him’.40 This led to the association of Ganymede with ‘children dying young’.41 It may also be significant that ‘Renaissance humanists saw the theme as an allegory for the progress of the human soul towards Christ’,42 interpreting Ganymede’s ascent as a spiritual or intellectual one. The juxtaposition of these two interpretations – the ascent of the mind, conveyed through beauty, against Zeus’ kidnap of a youth for physical gratification – can perhaps be overlaid onto Aschenbach’s psychology. Whilst believing himself to be privy to, and responding towards, a source of spiritual nourishment and enlightenment, his desires ultimately have a more sensual character.
This sensual aspect is hinted at by frequent allusions to Eros, the deity of erotic love. Immediately seeing Tadzio’s countenance as divine, Aschenbach’s first
35 ‘as the eagle had carried the Trojan shepherd through the air’.
36 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (London: The Folio Society, 1996), p. 115.
37 See Alastair Blanshard, Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2010), p. 131.
38 Graves, p. 117.
39 To the same purpose, Mann also invokes ‘die Göttin [...], die Jünglingsentführerein’ (‘the goddess, [...], the boy-abductor’, T 611), referring to the kidnap of Cleitos and Cephalos by Eos.
40 Van Mander, cited in Peter Schoon et al., Greek Gods and Heroes in the Age of Rubens and Rembrandt (Athens and Dordrecht: National Gallery/Alexandros Soutzos Museum, 2000), p. 250.
41 Schoon et al., p. 250.
42 Irene Earls, Renaissance Art: A Topical Dictionary (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 124.
detailed appreciation of the boy likens ‘die wahrhaft gottähnliche Schönheit des Menschenkindes’43 (T 589) to ‘das Haupt von Eros’44 (T 589). Tadzio appears to him as the very personification of desire; when Eros later becomes Aschenbach’s master45 we understand that it is Tadzio he follows. Mann’s notes describing Eros could apply equally to Tadzio: ‘Eros ist: jung und von zarter Bildung, geschmeidig, ebenmäßig u.
von schöner Haltung.’46 Aschenbach muses over the service Eros performs for the artist, allowing for a higher contemplation of beauty, claiming that ‘wir Dichter den Weg der Schönheit nicht gehen können, ohne daß Eros sich zugesellt und sich zum Führer aufwirft’47 (T 638). If Tadzio is Eros, then Aschenbach hopes that he will guide him thus. But Eros is associated with erotic love and desire; Heilbut considers Tadzio ‘an erotic figure, though not a pornographic one’,48 and notes the violence with which Eros is also associated (especially for Mann), reflected in the fact that
‘whenever Tadzio’s older friend assaults him it borders on rape’.49 The sensual and violent elements of Eros, which Aschenbach (perhaps consciously) ignores, are exposed by the deity’s classical connotations: ‘the early Greeks pictured him as a Ker, or winged “Spite”, like Old Age, or Plague, in the sense that uncontrolled sexual passion could be disturbing to ordered society’.50 Worship of Eros focused on his erotic nature, and he was often worshipped ‘as a simple phallic pillar’.51 Perhaps this is the pillar we find surrounded by the inebriated Bacchae in Aschenbach’s dream
43 ‘the truly divine beauty of the human child’.
44 ‘the head of Eros’.
45 ‘Eros, der sich seiner bemeistert’ (‘Eros, who had mastered over him’, T 620)
46 ‘Eros is: young and of gentle breeding, smooth, well-proportioned and of beautiful countenance’, Ehrhard Bahr, Erläuterungen und Dokumente – Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991), p. 107.
47 ‘We poets cannot take the path of beauty unless Eros accompanies us and becomes our leader’.
48 Heilbut, p. 253.
49 Ibid., p. 251.
50 Graves, p. 62.
51 Ibid.
(which will be examined in greater detail below). Once again, Mann employs a classical figure to illuminate his protagonist’s psychological state.
Given their exchange of letters, it is likely that Mann was aware of the work of Sigmund Freud and the significance of Eros to the psychologist: ‘Freud saw Eros [...]
as a social binding-agent, feeding the appetite for construction. But he also sensed the destructive potential of its symbolic exchange with Thanatos (a personification of death) in a yin-and-yang process.’52 According to Freud, who juxtaposed the life instinct (Eros) with the death instinct (Thanatos), ‘instinctual impulses are frustrated in the individual [...], by cultural ideals that society imposes’.53 Such repression causes aggression and guilt. This may be so with Aschenbach, whose death by cholera
‘may be punishment that [Mann] imposes, or that [he] metes out, for his forbidden wishes’.54 The repression of Aschenbach’s erotic desires could also indicate wider
‘collective cultural malaise’,55 where his death warns against the repression society demands.
Mann’s use of classical allusions to expose Aschenbach’s psychology is probably most famous in his use of Apollo and Dionysus, whose struggle is internalised in Aschenbach. These two figures appear in both Der Tod in Venedig and Il fuoco in a form that strongly resembles the twin ‘Kunsttriebe’56 of Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872). In this text Nietzsche posits
‘dass die Fortentwickelung der Kunst an die Duplicität des Apollinischen und des
52 Dominic Pettman, After the Orgy: Towards a Politics of Exhaustion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 6. Freud only actually employed the figures of Eros and Thanatos after the publication of Der Tod in Venedig, the concepts to which he attached these names were constant phenomena in his studies, present in works preceding Mann’s novella.
53 Ellis Shookman, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice: A Reference Guide (Westport: Greenwood, 2004), p. 102.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 ‘artistic impulses’, Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie (aus dem Geiste der Musik), § 12.
Dionysischen gebunden ist’.57 As psychological impulses, the Apollinian (after the god of light and poetry) tends towards restraint and clarity, whilst the Dionysian is characterised by intoxication, loss of control, and excess. The two impulses oppose and balance each other, and the sublimation of one by the other ensures that neither triumphs definitively. Where the balance tips in favour of the Apollinian drive, an art form that is overly Apollinian will result – such as sculpture or epic poetry; an excess of the Dionysian impulse results in a distinctly Dionysian art form, such as music.58 The zenith of art59 was marked when the two impulses ‘mit einander gepaart erscheinen und in dieser Paarung zuletzt das ebenso dionysische als apollinische Kunstwerk der attischen Tragödie erzeugen’.60
Mann depicts Aschenbach’s gradual departure from a strictly Apollinian existence towards Dionysian delirium. The description of Aschenbach’s former monastic routine, combined with the restrained and classical nature of his earlier literature, presents an excessively Apollinian figure. He has ‘entered into a covenant with Apollo’,61 but in Venice, he ‘unwittingly goes out in search of Dionysus and dies in his embrace’.62 The artist has ‘nur so gelebt – und der Sprecher schloß die Finger seiner Linken fest zur Faust - ; niemals so – und er ließ die geöffnete Hand bequem von der Lehne des Sessels hängen’63 (T 566). But with the gesture that closes chapter
57 ‘that the advancement of art is tied to the duality of the Apollinian and the Dionysian.’ Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie (aus dem Geiste der Musik), § 1.
58 It is important to note that Apollinian music also exists (and would be characterised by structure and suggestion), but that, for Nietzsche, music best allows for expression of the Dionysian impulse.
59 At least, according to Nietzsche.
59 At least, according to Nietzsche.